To turn the wound against all scars.

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

– ‘There can be no perfect man.Each of our lives is a finite series of errors which tend to become rigid and repetitious and necessary. Every man’s personal proverb about himself is: ‘Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people.’ The whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. you don’t change corpses. Corpses aren’t bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them look fit to be looked at.’

– Marriage: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.

– In brief, as the alert reader has concluded long before this, we were typically married. We had happy moments which we could share with no one,; we had our insider jokes; we had our warm, sensual, sexual love as we had our mutual concern (well, Lil anyway), interest in and pride in our children, and we had our two increasingly frustrated, isolated private selves. The aspirations we had for these selves did not find fulfillment in marriage, and all the twisting and turning on the bed together couldn’t erase this fact, although our very dissatisfaction united us.

– What if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? – or, like the mastodon’s huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being someone represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles?

– Patterns, patterns, oh, to break those chains. But we drag our old selves with us and they impose their solid oak frames on all our experience.

– Middle age, like rigor mortis, has set in.

– Isn’t it just possible that the desire not to be unified, not to be single, not to have one personality may be the natural and basic human desire in our multivalent societies?

– But remember, you all are potentially chameleons of the spirit, and thus of all the illusions that rob men of their divinity this is the cruelest; to call the rocklike burdensome shell of ‘character’ and ‘individuality’ man’s greatest development. It’s like praising a boat for its anchor.